Review: Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time Wields the Dullest of Blades

The game lacks for Samurai Jack’s smooth, stylish animation and deceptively deep characterizations.

Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time
Photo: Adult Swim Games

Genndy Tartakovsky’s television series Samurai Jack remains memorable for its smooth, stylish animation and its deceptively deep characterization of its titular samurai, who’s transported into an unrecognizable future that no longer has a place for him, and where his magical foe, Aku, reigns supreme. Evincing little of that style and depth, Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time’s story plays out in a 50-second window to time from Samurai Jack’s series finale that occurred off screen, stretched out here to a five-to-six hour experience in which Jack finds himself unstuck in time and reliving his past. The game’s 3D art style inevitably loses the comic book-like screen framing of Samurai Jack, but worse is that playing Battle Through Time feels like you’re watching a clip-show-like reprisal of the series.

To its credit, Battle Through Time nicely mines Tartakovsky’s source material in its efforts to at least be an entertaining brawler. The enemies—doddering robotic alligators, sleek metal fish demons, agile and leonine bounty hunters—are as comical yet deadly as they are on the show. Jack’s prowess in combat is also neatly summed up by the variety of tools at his disposal. That includes everything from shurikens and bows to machine guns, plus five different classes of melee weapons: trusty swords, fast fists, horde-clearing hammers, distance-closing spears, and powerful clubs. Even the game’s genre-standard skill tree stands out for the way it reflects Jack’s growth on the series, with separate branches for his Combat, Physical, and Spiritual levels, and the in-game shop where he can purchase skill upgrades allows for a good cameo from Da Samurai. None of this is particularly innovative for the genre, but it at least solidifies Battle Through Time as a flattering, form-fitting adaptation of the show.

Nonetheless, the game’s combat is cluttered. Each type of enemy is weak to one of Jack’s weapons, but because he can only equip up to four different items at once, the fluid fights are broken up by constant trips to the pause menu, where players must swap out their gear. Along the same lines, the game introduces a durability meter to all weapons (save for Jack’s Magical Sword and his fists) that requires players to frequently change armaments. Ostensibly, this exists to make players experiment with all the various hammers, spears, and clubs at their disposal, but given that you can just stockpile identical versions of the same weapon, the majority of items that Jack acquires by disarming—or in the case of Beetle Drones, dis-legging—his opponents come to feel as if they exist only for their cosmetic appeal.

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Instead of following in the footsteps of a classic like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, which thrusts its familiar animated characters into bizarre new worlds that could hold up on their own, Battle Through Time chooses to instead recreate specific, random episodes from the series, and in contextless ways. There’s a dog who flies around in a spaceship, wears a monocle, and offers you helpful advice, but if you haven’t watched the show, you wouldn’t know this to be Sir Rothchild, a canine archeologist. You’ll encounter a kilted warrior, as well as his warrior daughters, but the game never gets around to explaining that he’s the Scotsman, Jack’s most trusted ally on Samurai Jack. Boon’s Castle was where Jack met the Scotsman’s wife on the series, and the Cave of the Ancients was where he saw his potential fate reflected in that of a long-suffering Viking warrior, but those locals don’t feel purposeful in the game, as they exist here only to provide differing backdrops for otherwise identical fight sequences.

The ability to walk a mile in Samurai Jack’s sandals simply isn’t worth the cost, given Battle Through Time’s clunky 3D rendering of Tartakovsky’s distinctive visuals, its empty retelling of individual episodes from the series, and repetitive boss fights, especially the one against Demongo, one of Aku’s strongest minions. All of which is to say that players would be better off firing up their Hulu apps if they want to get a sense of Samurai Jack’s breadth and wonder.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Sandbox Strategies.

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Score: 
 Developer: Soleil Ltd.  Publisher: Adult Swim Games  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: August 21, 2020  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Violence, Blood  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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